The U.S.‘s war with Iran is just a few says old and President Donald Trump is not ruling out deploying U.S. ground troops to Iran.
In an exclusive interview with The New York Post, Trump said he would deploy ground troops to Iran “if they were necessary.” He added he didn’t “have the yips” about “boots on the ground” like his predecessors. He added he had “to do the right thing” no matter what.
“I don’t have the yips with respect to boots on the ground – like every president says, ‘There will be no boots on the ground.’ I don’t say it,” Trump said Monday. “I say ‘probably don’t need them,’ [or] ‘if they were necessary.’”
Trump’s words come after joint U.S.-Israeli strikes targeted Iran’s military and political leadership Saturday.
The Post asked the president about the results of a new Reuters/Ipsos poll conducted over the weekend which showed 27% approved of the strikes, 43% disapproved, and 29% were unsure.
Trump dismissed the numbers.
“I think that the polling is very good, but I don’t care about polling. I have to do the right thing. I have to do the right thing. This should have been done a long time ago.”
“I don’t think the polling is low. Look, whether polling is low or not, I think the polling is probably fine,” Trump continued. “But it’s not a question of polling. You cannot let Iran, who’s a nation that has been run by crazy people, have a nuclear weapon.”
“I think people are very impressed with what is happening, actually,” Trump added. “I think it’s a silent – if you did a real poll, the silent poll – and it’s like a silent majority.”
Trump said the ultimate decision to act on strikes came after intelligence he received about the regime pursuing its nuclear program while negotiations were ongoing.
“We had very serious negotiations, and they were there, and then they pulled back,” he said. “They wanted to make a nuclear weapon, so we destroyed them completely, but we found they were in a totally different site – totally different – because the sites that we took out were permanent. They tried to use them, but they were totally, as I said correctly before, obliterated, right? So then we found them working on a totally different area, a totally different site, in order to make a nuclear weapon through enrichment, so it was just time.”
The president said the campaign was advancing “pretty quickly.”
“We’re right on schedule, way ahead of schedule in terms of leadership – 49 killed – and that was, you know, going to take, we figured, at least four weeks, and we did it in one day,” he explained.
Trump was also asked about potential retaliation from Iran.
“We’ll take it out. Whatever. It’s like everything else, we’ll take it out,” he said.
